NEW DELHI, 24 October 2016 : In order to provide proper skills to farmers, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has decided to impart training to over 2.4 million farmers by 2022.

The training manual will includes polyhouse construction, biogas, vermi compost and others.

Speaking at an Farm Innovators Meet in New Delhi recently, ICAR Deputy Director General (Extension) A K Singh said with over 140 million farmers, we don't have skilled farmers to meet this requirement of skilled farmers, ICAr has decided to train over 2.4 million by 2022.

The training has been designed as per the as per the standards of the Ministry of Skill Development And Entrepreneurship, Singh stressed.

Though ICAR have been skilling farmers, but it was not done as per the Skill Development Ministry's standard of 200 hours coaching to provide a proper certificate.

Singh said a separate training of 16 hours would be conducted for re-skilling of those farmers who have already been trained from the ICAR.

Need to focus on agripreneurship

The meet also had a technical session on ‘Farm Innovators Initiatives’ where selected innovative farmers shared their experiences on the agripreneurship endeavor.

Dr J.P. Sharma, J.D.(Extension) , IARI, emphasized the participatory action needed for farm entrepreneurship development.

This session was esteemed with multi disciplinary and multi dimensional topics like Marketing Innovations, Organic cultivation and optimum production, Floriculture, Diversified agriculture and Seed production.

Sharma also said that value chain development and market linkages need to be strengthen for the prosperity and betterment of the farmers, and time has came to change the strategy of extension teaching of farmers from’ how to produce’ to ‘how to market’.

As many as 100 farmers across the country presented their innovative farm models at the conference organised by Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), which is part of ICAR.

Image Credit: bioforsk.no